From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020510 Description of problem: Dell Inspiron 5000 keyboard hangs when the touchpad is touched while the system is configured for an USB mouse (thus /dev/psaux is not polled). This happens only with the latest A08 BIOS, not A06. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Update to A08 BIOS 2.Configure the system for USB mouse (for example) 3.Boot, use the keyboard, everything works fine 4.Touch touchpad (or move external PS/2 mouse) 5.Keyboard freezes Actual Results: Keyboard is not usable (not in X and not at the console) Expected Results: Keyboard should continue to work. Additional info: It is possible to revive the keyboard by login in with ssh and do "cat /dev/psaux". Touching the touchpad is not causing any problems and the keyboard works again. If the cat process is aborted and the touchpad touched, the keyboard freezes again. I am using the following workaround: put at the end of rc.local the following line: cat /dev/psaux > /dev/null & Diagnosis: This problem should be fixed in the kernel. As it did not occur with the A06 BIOS, I assume it is not neccessary to really poll psaux all the time, instead the psaux port has to be disabled proberly. I think this is quite a servere bug, it took me almost a year to figure out how to work around it. It already appeared in 7.1 and 7.2. Feel free to contact me if you need somebody for testig.
Unfortunately, running Linux on the Inspiron 5000 isn't officially supported by Dell. Our recommendation is to either continue using your script, or to go back to using the A06 BIOS. This isn't something that Dell will fix in BIOS, though it's likely that the fix would be better implemented there then in the kernel.
See also Bug 32533.
Created attachment 59484 [details] Possible fix
Requestor, please indicate if you are comfortable with testing kernel patches.
Thanks for the possibe fix. I will test the kernel patch.
Created attachment 59486 [details] Working fix for 2.4.18-4 based on 2.4.19-pre8-pole patch with additional code to activate it automatically on affected Dell laptops.
I have adopted the original pole patch for 2.4.18-4 and it works with my Dell Inspiron 5000. I added some code to dmi_scan.c to automatically activate the workaround on Dell Latitude C600, Dell Inspiron 5000e, and Dell Inspiron 5000 (only for A08 BIOS). On other machines it still can be activated manually. The patch is attached.
The fix must go upstream (linux-kernel). I'll keep an eye on it in my community capacity, but Dell 5000 sufferers better keep it on the radar too.